I would like to see the possibility to mark threads as "unread" and not as "new". I can't read all new threads whenever I login. But the next time online I have to read all titles just to see, if there is a thread which was new the _last_ time I logged in and hasn't been read already by me.

I don't have anything to do with running Gentoo, but I do have my own phpBB-powered forums. Maybe I can shed some light on this.

As far as I can tell, phpBB has a very simple way to work out which posts are 'unread'. When you log in, it looks at the time you'd last been seen previously and takes that to be the time of your 'last visit'.

This is used for the 'view posts since last visit' link - it's basically a search for all posts since this last visit time. Likewise, when you browse a forum and see topics with unread posts, this is just based on that last visit time.

I suspect it does it like this for efficiency. How many users are there on a typical forum? And how many posts? It would require a very big database table to keep track of who's read what to the level of detail you get in your local news/e-mail reader.

What I tend to do if I need to follow a forum closely is log in and open up a load of unread topics (Mozilla's tabbed browsing helps here) and then log off fairly soon. That way I can log on again later and the 'last visit' time is a bit better...